


and i beg you call the tune

by greenlily



Category: Fire and Hemlock - Diana Wynne Jones
Genre: Academia, F/M, Folklore, Gen, Happy Ending, Magic, Romance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-19
Updated: 2012-12-19
Packaged: 2017-11-21 12:52:34
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,632
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/597977
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/greenlily/pseuds/greenlily
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"And then he said he'd chosen his own path, but that he had no right to choose yours for you." Or, what happens after the end of the story.</p>
            </blockquote>





	and i beg you call the tune

**Author's Note:**

  * For [iphianassa](https://archiveofourown.org/users/iphianassa/gifts).



**Now, Here**

The other three have been to Boston before, but this tour is Tom's first time here. Ann and Ed ride in a taxi together, Sam taking a second taxi with most of the luggage and Tom taking a third. He cranes his neck around the cello case to squint through the front windscreen and hopes the driver knows where he's going.

In the end, the directions given to them by the management at the Stanhope Theater turn out to be accurate. It really does sit on the corner of a hideously complicated intersection, and it really is impossible to miss once you've seen it. It's also, mercifully, quite near where the quartet will be staying for the next few days.

Tom hadn't, for some reason, expected there to be such a thing as a boarding house in America. "Guest house," Ann had corrected him. "Much cheaper than a hotel, and they don't mind people coming and going at all hours. The woman at the Stanhope said that most of their guest artists stay there."

When Tom stumbles up the stairs and into the front hall, Ann and Sam are there waiting for him with serious faces. He nearly drops the cello.

"It's all right," Sam tells him quickly, taking it away from him. "Her granny rang and left a message and said to tell you it was all right. They're both fine."

Ann takes both Tom's hands in hers. "She also said we weren't to end the tour early, no matter how much you insisted. Come and have some tea, you've gone white as a sheet." She tugs firmly at his hands and he moves to follow Sam down the corridor.

 _Three days,_ thinks Tom, walking, a footstep for each word. _Three days and I'll see her. Three days and I'll see them. Three days and we can begin._

\------------ 

**Then, There**

None of them could have set foot in Hunsdon House afterwards, if they had wanted to, not even Leslie. The house and grounds had taken on the deserted look that meant Laurel and her people had shut themselves inside. 

Polly fixed her mind firmly on turtles and snails retreating into shells, slow things that hid and waited because they couldn't run. _Cats hide themselves away too,_ whispered Hero, _when they're mortally wounded. When they've been beaten, they crawl away to die._

"Don't believe it for a moment," said Ann quietly. Polly looked at her, startled, and Ann smiled briefly. "I could see on your face what you were thinking. It's no good, you know. There's a reason the song doesn't tell the end of the story."

Leslie shivered, and Sam put a hand on his shoulder. "It's all right. You're not going back there, whatever happens next." 

"We'd better go to Granny's house," said Polly. She had to stop for a moment and swallow. "She didn't expect me to come back."

Tom smiled. "We'll have to. We couldn't all fit into my car, and anyways, it's rather busy with some rosebushes just now."

Granny turned pale when she saw them, just for a moment, so pale that Leslie, who was nearest, darted forward and put a hand under her elbow. She shook him off nearly at once.

"I'm quite all right, young man. I was only surprised." Then, getting a good look at him, "By the rights of it, I should be holding you up. Jackets off, all of you, and anyone who's got wet shoes and socks."

In the ensuing scuffle of finding dry socks and extra jumpers and making quantities of tea, Polly saw Granny talking quietly first with Ann, then with Ed, then with Tom. The talk with Ann ended with Granny's arms round her, holding her as she had held Polly when she was very small. The talk with Ed ended with blankets and cushions and makeshift beds on the floor of the sitting room, as well as on the sofa (Ann) and the big armchair (Leslie). 

The talk with Tom ended with Tom marching out the back door and slamming it shut behind him.

* * * * * * * *

Halloween had been Tuesday. On Wednesday morning, a man came with a truck and winched Tom's car out of the Hunsdon House gardens. Ed had a key to it, and to Tom's flat as well. He packed up the miraculously unbroken cello, belted it carefully into the passenger seat, and drove off towards London.

Ann and Sam and Leslie went away on the train a little later. Leslie hugged Polly, so tightly she felt her ribs creak.

"Thanks," he murmured in her ear. "If you ever need anything..."

Polly gently unwrapped his arms and gave him a little push. "Go home, Leslie." She smiled to soften her words. "Your mother will be so glad to see you."

Sam patted her on the shoulder and steered Leslie out the door. Ann stayed behind a moment and hugged Polly herself, quite as fiercely as Leslie had. Polly didn't push her away.

"Come and see us soon," said Ann. "We've bought a house for the quartet to live in. Practice rooms in the basement. It’s in Somerset, near a place called Herondale." She fished in her bag and produced a small pasteboard card that said The Dumas Quartet. "Not such a long way from Oxford, if you don’t mind a rather infrequent train schedule."

"Of course I'll come. Will Tom..." Polly let the sentence trail off.

Ann sighed. "I don't know. We had never talked about what would happen afterwards. Well, I mean, we couldn't--Ed and Sam didn't know, and I wasn't to remember." 

"He won't," said Granny. Polly hadn't seen her come into the room, but she was there now just behind Polly's shoulder. Polly and Ann both swung round to look at her, and she glared back at them. "I had nothing to do with it this time."

"If you didn't send him, why did he go?" Polly knew she shouldn't snap. If Granny said it wasn't her doing, then it wasn't, and that's all there was to it. 

"Ann!" called Leslie from outside. "We're going to miss the train!"

"I've got to go." Ann hugged Granny, and then Polly again. "Come and see us." And she was gone, hurrying down the road with her huge bag banging at her hip with every step.

The house was very quiet. Polly looked at Granny.

"I told you, Polly," said Granny, meeting her eyes. "I didn't tell him to go, not this time. You're old enough to choose for yourself."

 _Choose,_ whispered Hero. _You've got to choose and go on choosing._

"He said," Granny went on, "that it would never be done, one way or another. Well, that's plain enough. They'll be coming back out soon, at That House, and going on as they do. And then he said he'd chosen his own path, but that he had no right to choose yours for you."

Polly went cold. _I want to see you, I want to go on seeing you,_ Tom had said to her, both of them dripping wet in the garden of Hunsdon House. But where had they been, really, when he'd said it? 

Here and Now, Tom had stalked out without saying goodbye.

 _You can choose,_ Hero told her.

Granny was still looking at her. "And then I told him that he was an idiot, because anyone could see you'd chosen to walk his path years ago."

"And that was when he left?"

"That was when he left."

Oh. _Oh._ "Granny, I've got to go back to Oxford today. As soon as possible. Now."

"Well, if you must." Granny reached over to where Polly's shoes had been set to dry next to the stove. "Why so quickly?"

"East of the Sun and West of the Moon," Polly told her. "He's supposed to go far away through both his own choices and no fault of his own. I'm supposed to choose whether or not to follow him and bring him back."

Granny sniffed. "If you ask me, you've done quite enough running after your Thomas."

Polly dropped into a kitchen chair and laughed and laughed.

* * * * * * * * 

"Didn't _anyone_ think I'd come back?" asked Polly, exasperated.

"Well, not alone," said Fiona. "Didn't it work?"

"Yes," said Polly. Then, "No. Yes. Not yet?"

Fiona sighed. "Come on. I've got some whisky to put in the tea. Alcohol can only improve this conversation."

They sat up very late that night, essays forgotten, although as the night wore on the table acquired a covering of lists and notes in Fiona's fierce scrawl and Polly's spiky capitals on whatever bits of paper had come to hand. Polly scribbled frantically in the margins of a Chinese takeaway menu and remembered Tom's first letter, written partly on music paper.

"We'd better go to bed," Fiona said at last. "That's all I can think of until the library opens tomorrow."

Polly yawned. "I'm not even sure where to begin."

"Celtic mythology collections are in the Taylor," said Fiona. "And the," she looked at one of Polly's lists, "Child Ballads ought to be wherever the rest of the music books are. You'd better take those yourself."

"I will," said Polly. "But I think perhaps the fairy tales come first."

* * * * * * * *

After the first day, Polly went to her tutor to ask for an exception to the library rule that undergraduates could not take out more than four books on one subject at once.

("Why?" asked Dr. Powell. She was American and, most unusually for a professor of literature, never used three words when one would do.

Polly thought quickly. "Shakespeare," she said. "I'm looking at common themes among the legends he used for the basis of some of his plays."

Dr. Powell looked at Polly over the top of her glasses. "That's hardly an original essay topic. I certainly hope you're not spending too much time on it."

"No," said Polly. "Not too much.")

After the third day, Fiona had to go back to her own research.

("I'm not deserting you," she promised Polly. "The books will be all over the flat, and I'll go on reading them around the edges, and we'll go on talking them over. But if I read any more stories just now, I'm going to begin losing sight of what's actually real."

"Yes," said Polly. _We know_ , added Hero.)

After a week, Polly came home from the library with an armful of books and found their block of flats dark, cold and echoingly empty. This wasn't the first time the electricity had gone out without warning, and all the residents had got into the habit of carrying pocket torches with them everywhere they went. 

Fiona had left Polly a note on the door of their flat. **Repairman has been called. Again. Meet me at Arrow.**

The Arrow was the pub of choice for students of their year whose priorities included edible food and tolerably clean glassware. Polly unlocked the front door, set her books carefully inside the darkened doorway, locked it again, and followed Fiona's instructions at her best trainee-hero running speed.

Inside, the pub was warm and smelled pleasantly of strong coffee. Polly stopped by the front door and unwound her muffler. Fiona was waving at her from a table on the far side of the room.

There were far too many people jammed around most of the tables. Polly climbed over someone's legs, turned a corner and stumbled. Looking up, she was alarmed to realize that she had stumbled into someone quite tall, with a mop of curly fair hair. 

_Oh no, not again._

The person with curly fair hair looked around and smiled absently. "Do be careful." She turned back to her book. Very definitely a girl. Very, very definitely. Not Leslie at all.

 _Leslies were for Pollys, once,_ murmured Hero. _Not now._

Fiona pushed a mug of coffee at her. "Here. Your timing's good, it's still hot. Was there anything helpful in the Drew and Davies book?"

"I don't know yet. I went back today and fetched some of the things they cite as Suggested Reading." Polly sipped her coffee and considered the collection of essays that the librarian at the Taylor had given her yesterday. The essays were all by female scholars, about quests and quest objects in European folklore, and the editors--a married couple from somewhere in Wales--had apparently co-written a paper with Dr. Powell years ago.

"Are you..." Fiona trailed off. "I mean, is any of this helping?"

Polly thought about it. "It's beginning to. I mean, there are an awful lot of things I look at and immediately know they're the absolute wrong thing."

Fiona brightened. "Well, that'll save you some time. What's been the wrong thing so far?"

"Compulsion," said Polly immediately. "Anything that tampers with free will." She dug in her shoulder bag (which by now rivalled Ann's for variety of contents if not for size) and came up with her notebook. "So far, the only things that _haven't_ been wrong are the stories about...oracles, divination, seeking wisdom."

"Telling fortunes." Fiona giggled. "Too bad we haven't got the Prefects' Mirror. Pol, what is it? You went somewhere just now, inside your head."

Polly stared at her. "You've done it again," she said. "That's what we need."

"What, the mirror?"

"Yes. No. Not quite a mirror." Polly was dimly aware that she was shouting, that she had to shout to hear herself over Hero, because Hero had stopped whispering to her and was telling her quite loudly that it was about time she figured it out. "A fortune-teller. Something that shows possibilities but doesn't compel the result."

"Pardon me?"

Polly wheeled around to see who had spoken. Standing behind her, with an apologetic look on her face, was the girl with hair like Leslie's.

"Pardon me," said the girl again. "I wasn't listening, honestly, but you did shout rather."

Fiona scowled at her. "This is a private conversation. Can we help you?"

"Well, no." The girl with hair like Leslie's smiled. "My gran’s from Sweden. They tell fortunes there, at Midsummer. I think perhaps I can help _you_."

* * * * * * * *

The girl with hair like Leslie's was reading mathematics at Somerville. Her name was Marit Morrison, and she had long since become resigned to its unpronounceability--along with, it seemed, everything else. Polly had never met anyone her own age who was quite so unflappable.

Fiona continued to scowl, throughout the rest of that long first evening, well into the night that she and Polly eventually spent on Marit’s flatmate’s squashy pull-out sofa after the Arrow closed. 

“It isn’t normal,” she hissed in Polly’s ear, twisting to try and get more of herself under the battered quilt Marit’s other flatmate had unearthed from somewhere. “No one should be that cheerful when they’re being told to bugger off.”

Polly thumped her gently. “Hush. It’s not done to insult the person who’s taken you in for the night. Or do you really want to walk home at this time of night and find out if they’ve got the lights on yet?”

“Too right I don’t.” Fiona wriggled again. “Maybe she’s one of those people who thrives on late nights and winds up a complete zombie in the morning.”

Marit, as they discovered much too soon, was in fact that terrifying thing known as a morning person. Fiona and Polly blinked at each other over mugs of tea and Marit’s other other flatmate’s stale cornflakes (“She hasn’t touched them in weeks,” pointed out their hostess, “so she won’t miss them now. Eat.”) and somehow found themselves arranging that the three of them would meet again at the Arrow that night.

That was the beginning. Polly and Fiona and Marit spent countless hours drinking endless cups of tea and coffee at the Arrow, or at one or the other of their flats, and talking through the stories Polly found in the Oxford libraries. 

In the end, none of her research produced anything like the odd heavy click, like something falling into place, like something _right_ , that she’d felt when Marit first explained what young girls did in Sweden at Midsummer.

“It doesn’t so much matter what kinds of flowers they are,” Marit added. “Just so long as they’re nine different kinds.”

“That’s easy enough,” said Fiona absently. She was folding her clean laundry on the dining-room table because Polly and Marit were sitting on her bed. “I mean, if it can be any nine flowers.”

“Not as easy as all that,” Marit said. “Here, you’ve missed a sock. No, you need to gather nine different flowers from nine different meadows.”

“Meadows?” Polly frowned.

Marit waved a hand. “Fields. Hedgerows. Gran said you could pick them anywhere, as long as it wasn’t out of someone’s garden.”

Polly thought, suddenly, of the roses in the garden at Hunsdon House. No, something that had been planted and tended wouldn’t do for this. 

_Nothing that’s compelled,_ , said Hero. _Only things that have drifted on the wind and taken their chances._

* * * * * * * *

Three weeks after meeting Marit, Polly took out the Dumas Quartet’s business card, took a deep breath, and picked up the telephone. Ann’s voice, on the other end, made something relax in her shoulders that had been knotted for weeks.

Polly had been half-afraid that Ann, and Sam and Ed, would be angry that she hadn’t rung sooner. She was only half-afraid of that, because she was considerably more afraid of what they would say when they understood, really understood, what she’d done four years ago with Tom’s portrait.

In the end, she couldn’t face explaining it over the phone. “Can I come and see you? I’ve got lots to tell you all.”

“Yes, I rather think you have,” said Ann. “Come and stay for the weekend. We’ve a guest room. And a kitten.”

The guest room, tucked away in the attic across from another empty bedroom, was painted a pale creamy yellow and had a blue patchwork quilt on the bed. The kitten was called Grisha, and Sam and Ann spoke to him in Russian.

Grisha woke Polly on Saturday morning, soft gray paws and tiny cold nose and scratchy whiskers against her cheek, and scrambled up to her shoulder for the long walk downstairs. 

All three of them were in the kitchen, sitting around the table waiting for her. There was an empty chair. There was a cup of tea. It was hot. Polly didn’t ask how they knew when she’d arrive to drink it. Grisha hopped off her shoulder onto the table and sprawled inelegantly on his back.

For a moment, they all looked at her, and she wanted desperately to run back upstairs. Then Sam said, “It is so _good_ to have you here at last,” and got up out of his chair and hugged her, and Ed and Ann swarmed around them and Polly was in the middle of a knot of desperate affection.

 _They’ve been afraid you’d give up,_ said Hero. _They need you terribly and they thought you’d grown up into an ordinary person and they’d lost you._

Polly hugged them back, as best she could reach them all at once, and finally they all let go and sat around the table with their tea again. Ed batted Grisha away from Polly’s tea mug and handed it to her, looking at her expectantly.

“I...” Polly stopped and began again. “I was going to say I didn’t know how to begin. But I do. It started with Seb.”

Sitting in the sunny kitchen, the kitten wrapping himself round her fingers and worrying her thumb with his rough tongue, Polly told them everything. How Seb had goaded her--or, no, how she had told herself Seb was goading her, but how she had let it happen. How she had found the hemlock and hawthorn and straw, and burnt them together with her own hair, to make Tom tell her his secrets--to _compel_ him.

That part was difficult to tell, but the part that came afterwards was more difficult, only because she still didn’t remember it. Laurel had looked into her eyes, had done something, and after that she had allowed herself to be embarrassed into betraying Tom.

“You promised to forget him,” said Ann. Ann, Tan Audel, whose gift was memory, Tan Audel who never gave up. “But it wasn’t a promise you had the power to keep. I don’t care how old she is, she’s learned nothing of human nature if she didn’t realize that.”

After that, it was easier. Ann and Sam and Ed had been there for some of what happened next, after all, and they had remembered most of what they’d seen. Polly told them about hurrying back to Oxford and beginning her research, and about Fiona and Dr. Powell and the library and meeting Marit.

“She heard me say I needed my fortune told. Her grandmother had told her about Midsummer Night in Sweden.” Polly looked down at the table, hoping she wasn’t blushing. “The girls in Sweden pick nine different kinds of flowers, from nine different places. And they sleep with the flowers under their pillow, to invite dreams of their true love.” 

She took a deep breath. “Sometimes the dreams come true.”

The kitchen was very silent for a moment. Then, “A ritual that invites but doesn’t compel,” said Ed thoughtfully. “I think you may have found it.” He pushed back his chair stood up, and went out of the kitchen. Polly looked at Ann, who shrugged.

“Tom’s in London.” Sam looked solemn. “We’ve spoken to him on the phone, we know he’s not in any kind of trouble, but he won’t come to the house.”

“He says he’s practicing every day. And that he still wants to belong to the quartet. To us.” Ann clasped her hand over Sam’s where it lay on the table in front of him. “But he says he can’t come back yet.”

“No,” said Polly. “Not yet.”

Ed came back into the kitchen. His hands were full of books and folded papers.

“If you need nine different meadows,” he said, “you’re rather spoiled for choice. How far would you like to walk in a summer’s day?” And he unfolded the first of the papers, and the next.

They were maps. Hiker’s maps, ordnance survey maps, maps of the winding unpaved roads around Herondale. Polly glanced at the nearest book. 

“They’re wildflower guides,” said Ann quietly. “I picked them up at the bookshop two days before you called. It just seemed like a good idea.”

Polly thought, suddenly, of a dingy green-painted cloakroom in Bristol, of metal chairs and hot coffee from a thermos and music that had widened and wrapped around her like she belonged to it. She had been angry, so angry, at Laurel for taking that memory from her, but it was hers again now and she wasn’t going to lose it a second time.

_Choose and go on choosing._

“After this weekend,” Polly said evenly, “you won’t see me again for a while.” She looked around the table, meeting each of their eyes in turn. “I’ll be coming back at Midsummer. We, all of us, are going to bring him home.”

 

\------------ 

**New Hero**

When they get back to England, Fiona meets them at the airport in a van borrowed from some of Marit’s actor friends. Marit herself is fidgeting in the passenger seat, and bounces out to hug them all and help load the instrument cases.  


“Don’t worry,” says Fiona over her shoulder from behind the wheel. “She said you weren’t to worry.”

“And her gran says the same,” puts in Marit. “I’d do as she says if I were you.”

“Oh dear.” Tom laughs weakly. “Coming over a bit Queen Mother, is she?”

“Just a bit.”

Nothing in all Tom’s life has ever seemed as long as that drive, squashed into a seat between Ann and a suitcase, knowing what waits for him at the end of the road and still not quite able to believe it.

When the van pulls up to the house, Fiona waves the four of them out. “Upstairs, you lot. Your humble road crew will see to the instruments and the luggage. Go.”

Inside the house, Ann puts a hand on Sam’s shoulder and catches at Ed’s hand. “Let Tom go alone, this once.”

And so he climbs the stairs. Not all the stairs, not all the way up to Polly’s yellow-and-blue bedroom in the attics. Ed had swapped with her months ago, swearing he didn’t mind. So it’s to Ed’s big sunny room at the front of the house that Tom’s steps lead him, finally, finally.

The door is shut. He taps on it, so lightly he’s sure it won’t be heard. Granny opens it immediately, as though she’d been standing there waiting for him.

“Well, your timing might have been better. “ She sniffs. “She would have liked you to be here. But she had me with her, and those two rattling around downstairs with their van, and it’s all right. They’re both awake now. You can go in.”

Tom isn’t sure how he gets the door open, or how he shuts it once he’s on the other side. Nothing he touches seems quite real, not as real as what he’s seeing, not as real as his assistant-trainee-Hero propped against a heap of pillows on their bed or as real as what she’s holding in her arms.

“Come here,” Polly tells him. She looks terribly tired, but she’s smiling. “I’ve been telling her about her father for three days now. It’s about time she got to see you in person.”

Somehow, Tom manages to take the last few steps to the bed, sit on the edge of it, and look for the first time upon the face of his daughter.

Her eyes are wide open. They are blue. They are beautiful, blue, perfectly ordinary eyes. A tiny, nearly-unacknowledged fear somewhere in Tom’s heart turns to dust and blows away forever.

They had known, beforehand, that she would be a girl. They have decided, have told everyone, that her name is to be Emily Christine, for Granny and for Tom’s mother. 

They have not told anyone, not even Ann, the other name.

He had wanted so badly to be there when she was born, to have the most important words be the first thing she heard. Polly hadn’t wanted to begin it without his being there, and so it has been three long days. But it is all right.

He looks down at his daughter, the one thing he never thought he could dare to reach out and take and hold for his own, the thing that will hurt him if he grips it too tightly and will fall from his hands if he doesn’t hold tightly enough. His child. Their child.

Thomas Lynn has known for most of his life what it means to serve at the whim of a queen. He begins to understand, now, what it means to take up the same service of his own will.

_Choose, and go on choosing._

Polly looks at him. She had told him, once, that in real life he was really something quite different. And he had answered, lightly, not knowing what he was doing, “What am I?”

Polly doesn’t ask him that question now. She doesn’t have to. She shifts their daughter into his arms, and looks at him, and waits.

Tom looks down.

“Your godmother is a hero, and so are both your godfathers,” he tells his daughter. “Your great-grandmother has the spirit of a queen. Your parents fought for their freedom and yours, before you were born or thought of.

“Your name is Rose, and you are the hero of your own story.”

**Author's Note:**

> Many thanks to the best of all possible betas, who I will identify after reveal. :)
> 
> I've taken some liberties with the colleges of Oxford University and the geography of England. To my knowledge, there is no such village as Herondale in Somerset, and the nearest airport is in Bristol which may or may not be an unpleasantly long drive in a rattletrap van. For that matter, there is no Stanhope Theater in Boston, although it is possible to find guest houses.
> 
> A few academic characters from other fandoms have crept briefly into this story. If you think you recognize someone, you probably do.
> 
> The tradition of collecting flowers at Midsummer and sleeping with them under your pillow is not my own invention--it's still practiced in Sweden, as well as in Finland and other Scandinavian countries.
> 
> The title of the story is taken from the lyrics to "Uncle John's Band".


End file.
